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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago

> Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes

It depends if you put the space before and after the dashes--that, to be clear, are meant to be there--or if you don't.

▲ oniony 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.

▲ kuschku 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That depends on the language — whereas German puts spaces around —, English afaik usually doesn’t.

Similarly, French puts spaces before and after ? ! while English and German only put spaces afterwards.

[EDIT: I originally wrote that French treats . , ! ? specially. In reality, french only treats ? and ! specially.]

	▲	greenicon an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In German you use en-dashes with spaces, whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces. Some people dislike em-dashes in English though and use en-dashes with spaces as well.
	▲	iLoveOncall 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		French doesn't put one before the period.
	▲	bratwurst3000 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		french does "," and "." like the british and germans the rest is space befor space after

▲ LoganDark 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Technically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.

	▲	cachius 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities &hairsp; and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac... Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks: `: ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —` And they usually add space to the right of these: `“ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – —` https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp... 1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.

▲ fragmede 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What, no love for our friend the en-dash?

- vs – vs —

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chickensong 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I once spent a day debugging some data that came from an English doc written by someone in Japan that had been pasted into a system and caused problems. Turned out to be an en-dash issue that was basically invisible to the eye. No love for en-dash!

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1718627440 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This issue also exists with (so called) "smart" quotes.

	▲	fragmede 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Which, the iOS keyboard “helpfully” uses for you.

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ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Similar.

Compiler error while working on some ObjC. Nothing obviously wrong. Copy-pasted the line, same thing on the copy. Typed it out again, no issue with the re-typed version. Put the error version and the ok version next to each other, apparently identical.

I ended up discovering I'd accidentally lent on the option key while pressing the "-"; Monospace font, Xcode, m-dash and minus looked identical.